Herein lies a collection of game ideas, and experiments big and small.

SNES in VR

This exploration was based largely on work done by Myles Johnston, who did the work of writing a C# wrapper for the libretro dll for Unity 3D. Myles frequently posts on Youtube about his project creating game emulators that run 3D versions of old games. I was able to obtain a copy of his source code from one of his posts. I used it to create a simple exploration where the user is sitting on a couch in a bedroom playing Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The theoretical end goal of this project would be to create a multiplayer SNES emulator that is played in VR.

Space Tag

SpaceTag is a prototype for a multiplayer VR tag game played in small stunt craft flying through space. Cruise around with realistic Newtonian physics and attempt to physically ram the opponent when you are ‘IT’.

Low Poly VR

What does low poly look like in VR? Does it work? I threw some low poly assets in to a unity scene to try it out.

Telepresence

This has been an ongoing experiment to see if I could create an effective telepresence application paired with hardware that would be cheap and easy to deploy. The target use case is a telepresence device that 2 people could use to feel like they were really right next to one another for social interaction. Imagine sitting on a couch to watch TV. You sit down on the left side of the couch and place a small tripod with a spherical camera next to you. At the same time, a friend on the other side of the country sits on the right side of his couch and puts a small tripod on the left side of his couch. From your perspective, it would look like you are sitting on your friends couch next to your friend in person. You could each sync up a movie and watch it together or just chat sociably. I purchased 2 180° 1080p fisheye usb cameras for under $100. After creating a custom half sphere mesh with a UV map modified for the camera’s fisheye distorted lens, I was able to conduct a number of experiments to test the viability and cost of the project’s goal. So far I have been unable to get a framerate anywhere above 5fps when sending a signal over the internet. Only locally can I get 30fps (too low for VR), and 1080p stretched across 180° is fairly pixelated. I’m also now unsure on the viability of using a low powered low cost device such as a raspberry pi to host the sending of the video.